I Zimbra

Remember ingesting the Talking Heads’ 1979 Fear of Music for the first time? You may have come away with your brain drenched in a hybrid African / New Wave alchemical sweat. Not quite as aromatic as the sweat that oozed from Remain in Light, nor quite as pungent as the sweat that squirted from the somewhat more ragged 77. Fear of Music-generated sweat had a darker scent: More earthy, with an undercarriage of oak and peat moss. Beneath all that deep African funk was something very American – iconic portrait/bursts on simple themes: Drugs, Paper, Heaven, Animals, Cities. And underneath it all, something strange and wonderful and unlike anything you had heard before. But on the first track — I Zimbra — the African stuff did something sneaky to your brain: It set you up for deception. If you’re like most people (not saying that you are, but if you are), you may have assumed that the lyrics were a lifted tribal chant, cribbed from somewhere deep in the bowels of the Serengeti. The rhythms told you to assume that.

At some point, you realized that the strange-but-beautiful lyrics were not in fact African at all, but the words to a poem by turn-of-last-century European Dada poet Hugo Ball. This discovery may have made you giddy. And in your giddiness, you may have gone out and started a local Dada sub-committee and cut tin-man outfits from refrigerator cardboard and started doing readings from the Dada Manifesto at your local Vet’s hall. If you’re like most people. Not saying that you are, but if you are. And who could blame you? It was so beautiful:

Ubuweb, on Ball performing this and other poems at the Cabaret Voltaire:

Here, one evening, Hugo Ball read his “Verses without words”, based on the equilibrium of vowels, regulated and distributed exclusively in relation to the phonic value of the initial line. Clothed in azure, scarlet and golden cardboard, with a cylindrical shaman’s hat on his head … “I do not know what this music inspired in me, but I began to sing my sequences of vowels in recitative liturgical manner. The electric light was turned off as arranged and I was carried away covered in perspiration like a a magical bishop who disappears into the abyss.”

I remember hearing an old recording of Kurt Schwitter’s Ur Sonata when I was in school. It struck me as very musical, very rhythmic … (almost funky) … very funny and very entertaining. It was one of the first times I had heard the musicality of ‘language’ made so explicit. It didn’t matter that it was a made up language. … Using Hugo Ball’s text for I Zimbra was Brian Eno’s suggestion. I felt it was the perfect solution to the quandary we had gotten ourselves into: how do we have a ‘chant-like’ vocal that doesn’t place undue emphasis on the lyric content.

But Byrne/Eno weren’t the only ones not placing undue emphasis on lyric content. A universe away (but at almost exactly the same point in the time-space continuum), Donny and Marie were pouring their hearts into Goin’ Coconuts – a shlocky jewel-heist movie sporting the throw-away tagline “It’s so funny it’s a crime,” but which sunk like a stone and was hated by viewers and critics alike.

Perhaps to redeem herself from the embarrassment of that movie, perhaps to open up an untapped neural circuit, perhaps on a bar bet, Marie Osmond decided to take on no smaller challenge than Dada itself — by performing Hugo Ball’s poem “Karawane” for an international audience. And she nailed it.

Taken from a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not segment on sound poetry from the mid-80s. According to producer Jed Rasula, “Marie Osmond became co-host with Jack Palance. In the format of the show, little topic clusters (like “weird language”) were introduced by one of the hosts. In this case, the frame was Cabaret Voltaire. Marie was required to read Hugo Ball’s sound poem “Karawane” and a few script lines. Much to everybody’s astonishment, when they started filming she abruptly looked away from the cue cards directly into the camera and recited, by memory, “Karawane.” It blew everybody away, and I think they only needed that one take. A year or so after it was broadcast, Greil Marcus approached me, wanting to use Marie Osmond’s rendition of Hugo Ball for a CD produced in England as sonic companion to his book Lipstick Traces; so I was delighted to be able to arrange that.”

I got the “Talking Heads Brick” for my birthday.. It’s all the Talking Heads studio albums remastered on 5.1 DualDisc. They sound great in stereo, and after I move in a few months I will have my surround sound setup back.. I can’t wait to hear them.. I’m especially excited to hear “Fear of Music”

I seem to recall that the lyrics for “Artists Only” were not written by the band either. However, those lyrics were contemporary (I think a friend of the band wrote them).

So if Marie is a little bit Dada, and Donny is a little bit Broadway… (Still remember the Donny and Marie episode where they switched places, and MARIE did rock & roll. Explosions onstage and everything.)

Actually, that role was very consistent with the non-Dada side of his personality. Having performed in “Joseph” myself, and having heard the young Donny’s recording of “Let My People Go,” I can state that Osmond’s performances are perfectly consistent with his LDS theology.

I still have to find the lyrics for the Osmond Brothers’ “Crazy Horses,” however. That song might inhabit multiple worlds…

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Dusty Bins

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Stuck Between Stations, founded by longtime friends and musical co-conspirators in the San Francisco Bay Area, seeks to forge an online music community that values irreverent, honest writing, has little regard for coolness or trends, keeps its sense of humor, and won’t flinch from the sloppy and surprising ways music gets under our skin.

Our tastes and backgrounds diverge wildly, but we’re united by common beliefs that rock isn’t soft, jazz isn’t smooth, country isn’t young, adults aren’t contemporary, and genre restrictions are very overrated.

We’re open to the possibility that music from Mali or Madras (Chennai) or Memphis might sound more alternative, and more rocking, than the latest prescribed dose of “alternative rock.” We will report on new releases, but also recognize that something Son House recorded in the 1930s or Albert Ayler recorded in the 1960s might be exactly what we need to get through tomorrow.